January 2011

The seemingly interminable 2004 presidential campaign is well behind us now, but I’m still not willing to let it go yet. I want to hear an apology from someone about the most egregious smear to emerge from the campaign. I’m not talking about the Swift Boat Veterans, or “flip-flopping,” or anything perpetrated by Michael Moore. What I mean is the decision to transform my old home state into an epithet.

“Josiah Henson’s earliest memory was of the day that his father came home with his ear cut off.” So begins the first chapter of Fergus M. Bordewich’s outstanding history Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (HarperCollins, 528 pages, $27.95). Henson, born a Maryland slave in the eighteenth century and later an abolitionist, writer, preacher, and founder of a Canadian colony for former slaves, is believed to have been the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hero in Uncle Tom’s Cabin . His is just one of many riveting biographies in Bound for Canaan , which illuminates the lives of the many giants, forgotten and famous, black and white, enslaved and free, of the Underground Railroad, that loose network of safe houses and surreptitious routes northward, which began about 1770 and lasted until 1865.

“Every presidential message…should be (a) in English, (b) clear and trenchant in its style, (c) logical in its structure and (d) devoid of gobbledygook.” So wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in a memo as an assistant to President John F. Kennedy in 1963, to a State Department functionary after wading through “the latest and worst of a long number of drafts” sent by the department for the President’s signature.

The striped-pants set are by no means the only people who indulge in gobbledygook. Over the years, the Pentagon has asked for bids on such items as aerodynamic personnel decelerators (parachutes), interlocking slide fasteners (zippers), and wood interdental stimulators (toothpicks); and a lieutenant of my basic-training company back in the late 1950s called the folding shovel with which I was all too familiar a “combat emplacement evacuator.”

One summer day in 1939 a young man stopped another man under an elevated train in New York City and asked him, “Do rich people and poor people have anything in common?” The man replied, “God made all this, and he made it for everybody. And he made it equal. This breeze and these green leaves out here is for everybody.…This breeze comes from God and mancain’t do nothing about it.” The younger man would have many more conversations like that one, and with all the voices ringing in his head, he eventually sat down and wrote a sprawling love song to America’s complexity and paradox that he called Invisible Man .

Benjamin Franklin was far and away the most famous American when he went to France to wheedle help for the newborn American nation, which was having a very grim time of it when he got there late in 1776. Stacy Schiff’s wholly engrossing A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Henry Holt and Company, 480 pages, $27.50) casts the reader ashore on the French coast alongside Franklin, and together they learn to negotiate a city and a society at once magnificent and sordid, generous and dangerous (and, of course, so sexy that Americans have never quite gotten over it), and, above all, just as unfamiliar to eighteenth-century Franklin as it is to twenty-first-century us. If he couldn’t unravel its mysteries quickly enough, his brand-new nation might very well go under. Schiff’s introduction suggests the stakes:

When DVD’s were introduced, a number of critics hailed them as an opportunity for filmgoers to stop and reflect on films that hadn’t been given a fair shot the first time around. It hasn’t turned out that way. The constant flood of new product on the market has instead practically guaranteed that a film ignored on release has almost no chance of emerging into prominence on re release.

Such is the case with John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo (2004), which is remembered now, if at all, as a film that cost in excess of $130 million to produce and generated little more than $30 million in ticket sales. The film sank out of sight before anyone could analyze why it had failed, and since it was not a hit, no one wanted to defend it.

Part cookbook, part culinary history, part travel writing, Dining at Monticello: In Good Taste and Abundance , edited by Damon Lee Fowler (University of North Carolina Press, 208 pages, $35.00), shows that Thomas Jefferson was just as original a thinker regarding food as he was regarding everything else. Chapters delve into such things as his taste in wine as consumer and producer, the African-American influence in Monticello’s food culture, Jefferson’s inclination toward vegetarianism, and the task of restoring Monticello’s kitchen as it existed in his day. Also included are six dozen recipes adapted for modern cooks, some from originals in Jefferson’s hand, as well as an abundance of photographs of the restored Monticello that would be mouthwatering even without the sumptuous food they contain.

History teaches, but only those who are open to being taught. For others, history supplies a convenient set of templates into which everything that happens afterward can be fitted. The current Iraq war is a case in point. Supporters say it’s World War II all over again, while opponents say it’s Vietnam. In fact, it has some features in common with both. But why stop there?

THE WAR IN IRAQ IS LIKE: the Revolutionary War because…

American battle deaths have totaled in the thousands (around 4400 in the Revolution, though diseases took many more).

intervention by a third party (France, of all places) helped free a nation from tyranny.

the War of 1812 because…

Sometime around 1798 a man named John Houchins shot and wounded a bear in the Kentucky wilderness. He followed it to the entrance of a cave that turned out to be much bigger and more mysterious than the others that abounded in the region. The cave soon started drawing visitors, eventually including such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale.” Then, as now, the cave was known for its beautiful and haunting rock formations, with names like the Church, Fat Man’s Misery, Frozen Niagara, the Drapery Room, and the Rotunda. Equally fascinating were ancient skeletons and Indian relics preserved by the cave’s cool temperatures and low humidity (conditions that have also permitted the survival of ceiling graffiti written in candle soot, some from the early nineteenth century).